A small town in Quebec, 23-24 December. An employee working in an asbestos mine dies, so his co-worker Jos Poulin quits and informs his wife and kids that he plans to find another job. Benoit (15) works as a clerk in a store of his uncle Antoine and aunt Cecile. Benoit, who has a cast on his arm, decorates the store for the upcoming Christmas holidays, and flirts with assistant Carmen. When Mrs Poulin calls in that her teenage son Marcel died from fever, Antoine, who also works as an undertaker, brings Benoit with him on a sleigh to pick up the corpse. They place it in a coffin, but it falls down from the sleigh in the snow. Benoit wants Antoine to help him pick up the coffin, but Antoine is too drunk to help, lamenting how he never wanted to be an undertaker. Back at the store, Benoit discovers Cecile had an affair with Fernand, the assistant. When Fernand and Benoit return to the Poulin house to find the coffin, they find Jos, the wife and the kids inside, mourning the dead Marcel.
Included in Roger Ebert’s list of Great Movies, generally considered one of the best Canadian films of the 20th century, “My Uncle Antoine” is good, but still an overall overrated film. It builds its premise as a ‘slice of life’ film set a day before Christmas, but it never reaches the level of a ‘winter-style “Amarcord”’: not all of its episodes are equally interesting, and its characters are not that engaging. Its virtues are the subtle social commentary (the boss of the asbestos mine is English, while miner Jos is French, signaling the ambivalent relations between Quebec and the rest of Canada), as well as a lot of quiet little episodes from the townspeople: just before the funeral, Antoine struggles to unclinch the rosary from the fingers of the corpse in the coffin; a man generously throws packaged meat on the street from his carriage, while kids pick it up; Benoit (15) spots the girl Carmen wearing a wedding veil and starts chasing her across the room, all until she falls down and he puts his hand on her chest; Benoit and an assistant secretly peak through a door to observe a woman, Alexandrina, taking her bra off in front of the mirror and trying on a corset topless (a pure fan service scene, and a weak one, which is even repeated in a pointless dream sequence near the end, in which Benoit dreams that a topless Alexandrina is jumping in front of him). The storyline meanders until it aligns into a more proper narrative an hour into the film, when Antoine and Benoit travel in a carriage to pick up a corpse in a desolate house. The viewers learn that Antoine is unhappy with his life; that his wife is cheating on him; while the miner from the opening act, Jos, simply disappears from the film until the finale, where he plays no role anyway—all these subplots seem half-baked, incomplete or underdeveloped, and thus do not connect as a whole on a greater level. The director Claude Jutra directs with a steady hand, creating a genuine feeling of this small community, whereas the ending is powerful: it juxtaposes the arrangement of the Nativity of Jesus toys with the arrangement of the anti-Nativity of the Poulin family (their dead Marcel) to contrast how idealism is shattered by dark reality and death, whereupon the teenage protagonist Benoit grows up.
Grade:++
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